Language

Teacher professional development opportunities in Mexico are currently lacking. The traditional approaches of professional development such as workshops and conferences are commonplace but do little to bridge the gap between abstract concepts about teaching and learning and the
practicalities teachers face in the classroom. The purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to describe how ideas, materials, and social interactions form a PLN through online, informal pedagogical dialogues among English language educators as it relates to professional learning. The five participants of this study were selected from a total of 10 based on their willingness to complete an informed consent form, complete an initial online survey, interact with other professionals publically online, and participate in a final interview. The online survey contained demographic information about each case and included both open and closed items; a content analysis was done on public interactions that tool place online; and a final in-depth interview used open questions to inquire about how respective PLNs changed over time. All data was coded, categorized, and placed into themes based on the ideational, material, and social aspects of each PLN. The findings show that professional knowledge, skills sets, and overall dispositions emerge in unique ways based on how ideas, technologies, and personal contacts interrelate with each other over time, and that an individual’s PLN provides unanticipated benefits when sharing publicly online.

N ot long ago it was common to find instructors teaching languages, particularly Eng-lish in non-English-speaking countries, without a degree and with little to no experience or expertise. But today, governmental agencies like Mexico's Secretaría de Educación Pública (Ministry of Public Education) have begun to require that teachers have a degree that demonstrates sufficient skill and language proficiency. Nevertheless, being able to speak English and having a degree do not necessarily lead to purposeful language teaching, particularly with a traditional instructional approach that isolates language skills without appropriate contextual clues in a classroom environment where the teacher is didactic expert and students complacently follow along. Traditional methods of teaching English often include translating structures from the target language to the mother tongue; although this method may seem antiquated, it is still commonly practiced. Indeed, those teachers who were taught b...